Back before social media was a thing, someone said it was vain to have a page with my pictures on. But now we have Twitter and Facebook and Instagram so who's laughing now? Now I guess the question is more: why do you still have a personal website?  Well at least it gives me a place to back up my photos that I actually have some control over.

I'm more comfortable behind the lens than in front, but a while back I started trying to keep a current picture on my site.  Before social media it was a lot harder to know what people looked like, which was a problem if you ever wanted to meet in real life.  Or just were really, really nosey.

I think this may have been the first big St. George's Day festivals in Nottingham after people realised that more was made of the special days from other countries (e.g. St. Patrick's Day) while our own kind of went unnoticed.

Apparently the Nottingham one is now one of the biggest.

Rough and ready, unedited set of pics from Andy's Loukes' stag do. There might be some dodgy quality ones, as I just uploaded as quickly as possible.

A medieval battle re-enactment at Nottingham Castle.

A trip to Norfolk, looking for King Eider at Titchwell, Rough-legged Buzzard, and Lesser Yellowlegs at Stiffkey. We got the latter, but the light was so bad that hardly anything came out from that leg of the trip - which is a shame, as we got some great views of Redshank on the banks of some of the channels.

Titchwell was pretty good for Robins - they came extremely close - and some waders, but the light was variable and so action shots were right out.

After hearing of the Cutting Edge Japanese Swords exhibition at the British Museum, Andy Loukes and I just had to meet up with Jasper Wallace to gawp at around 100 swords, daggers, and other Japanese works of art. After that we didn't have much time to visit the rest of the museum, so it seemed appropriate to go to the Asian department in the time we had left.

A jet doing stunts

The Robin Hood Festival in 2004

A fun day geeking out over Navy tech, including going inside an actual submarine (HMS Alliance).

A rainy day in Nottingham, and a double bank holiday due to Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee.

These photographs almost cost me my camera, not due to the activities on the field of battle, but because of the weather. The heavy rain gathered on the camera and got inside; the camera started beeping and shut itself down, refusing to start up again which meant I couldn't get it to retract the lens. After a few tense days with the camera sitting around with its flaps open I put some fresh batteries in and it fired back up.